The 1000 Vote Club, Part 2 · 3:30pm Feb 18th, 2023
About two years ago, I did a blog that approached an interesting bit of site analysis: what kind of stories hit 1000 likes? It's a fairly small club, with only about 1.5% of all stories reaching that level and the numbers vastly favor older ones. So I did a bit of research to see at the time what stories that reached that high level and what their common factors were.
There were a few interesting take-aways:
- Humans (and particularly Anon as a character) grab a lot of eyes. Not all are HiE, but two thirds of the stories in last blog's analysis had the Human tag.
- Sex sells but Porn doesn't. Sex was the most common red tag by a long shot, but porn was relatively low down on the list.
- Similarly, porn stories only broke the 1k barrier in the hands of a couple of very specific authors. Basically, if you aren't Some Leech, little big pony, or Clopficsinthecomments? It isn't getting there.
- Some tags just will not perform. Self-harm and Non-con are bottom tier; humans are fine but nobody likes Equestria Girls or Anthro; Drama and Dark work out well but Tragedy and Horror fall short.
- Characters are mostly as expected, though Original Character scores really highly for how often people scold how badly written OCs are. As mentioned Anon was also a surprisingly high scorer, as were changelings in general.
Anyway! That quick look back out of the way, I wanted to circle around and look at the numbers again to see what's changed. Because I'm just endlessly curious and sometimes lunch breaks mean cursory analysis because I've got writer's block.
Let's start off by seeing just what breaks that 1k mark, divided up by publish year. At current, the site has 147,340 stories; 2,108 are at 1000 likes or more - 1.43%. (For context, 6,336 or 4.3% make 500 likes, and 32,718 or 22.2% make 100.)
2022 - 1 (of 6,268 for 0.016%)
2021 - 14 (of 7,468 for 0.187%)
2020 - 21 (of 8,580 for 0.244%)
2019 - 59 (of 8,987 for 0.656%)
2018 - 52 (of 9,563 for 0.544%)
2017 - 64 (of 10,962 for 0.583%)
2016 - 161 (of 12,955 for 1.242%)
2015 - 255 (of 15,844 for 1.609%)
2014 - 387 (of 20,172 for 1.918%)
2013 - 408 (of 21,774 for 1.874%)
2012 - 617 (of 21,685 for 2.845%)
2011 - 69 (of 2,211 for 3.121%)
(I've left out 2023 because it's just started and the highest one's only currently at 553 likes.)
So while the site's overall is 1.4%, that's really mostly a relic of age. Between old stories having more years to accumulate likes and the site's population decline, it's largely a misleading statistic. Current stories hit that threshold a lot less often: the past four years only total 95 stories hitting 1k+ out of 31,303 - 0.3%.(I opted to expand it to four years instead of three, because a mere 36 stories makes sample size a real issue, but adding 2018 would have been a further 50% increase in size.)
So like last time, I'll start with rating. 15 are E; 54 are T; 26 are M. So that's 16%/57%/27%. For comparison, the general story pool is 31%/37%/32%. Mature underperforms slightly, but Everyone underperforms a lot. (I suspect this is because E is the default rating, so a lot of low effort stories and novices lump theirs under that umbrella.)
Completion status is next: out of 95, 53 are Complete, 39 are Incomplete, 3 are On Hiatus, and none are Canceled. That's roughly in line with the results from two years ago. (As a side note, of the 39 that are Incomplete, 19 haven't been updated in at least six months and 15 haven't in a year. 8 are at least two years idle*.)
Third, let's talk length. The breakdown goes basically like this: 1 to 10k has 26 stories; 10-50k is 22; 50-100k is 19; 100-200k is 16; 200-500k is 9; and 500k+ is 3. Now, there's one interesting quirk here: in the 50-100k bracket, 8 of the 19 are 80 or 90k in length; and in the 100-200k range there's a similar block of 8 that are between 100 and 120k. So there's actually a fairly sizable lump at right about 100k that other bridge points don't have. To compare to the general population, 1-10k has 22,784 stories (0.11% hit rate); 10-50k has 6,515 stories (0.34%); 50-100k has 1,197 stories (1.59%); 100-200k has 566 stories (2.8%); 200-500k has 215 stories (4.2%); and 500k+ has 49 stories (6.1%). So longer does trend towards more upvotes, but I personally question if it's an indicator of quality or more the effect of having more times the story appears on the front page's Updates column.
Fourth comes the blue genre tags. Just as last time, the big winner was Comedy (53), followed by Slice Of Life (45) and Romance (32). Those three are still the most dominant, and even their combination as a trio manages 7 stories. After that it's interesting as there was a big surge of Adventure tags (25, up from 15 two years ago) and a slight but noticeable increase in the Drama (17) tag. Random's stayed about the same at 15. Fascinatingly, Porn and Dark remain tied at 11, which is an identical result to two years ago. (BIG asterisk on the Porn tag that I'll get into later.) For the rest, we've got Sad (5), Mystery (3), Anthology (3), Scifi (2), Tragedy (1), and Horror (1). Poor Thriller has a big round 0. For overall proportions, most of it is about what you'd expect with two quirks to note: first, Comedy has a much higher 1k+ ratio than the others (it has almost an equal number of total stories as Romance, but has 25% more 1k+ stories); and Anthology has a tiny number of stories (555 total, the next lowest is double that and most tags are quadruple or more) so it performs better than you would expect for its size. (But that may just be a statistical quirk because of the low base sample.)
Fifth is the red tags, which are always fun. Interestingly, the hit rate on the Sex tag has actually gone down - two years ago it was 35 of 80 stories, and now it's 31 of 95. In fact, it's lost the #1 red tag seed to Profanity (34) which had a massive jump from the previous 21. Violence also had a significant increase (26 from 16). Death remains a solid 4th at 13; followed by Gore (8), Fetish (8*), and Narcotics (5). Non-Con still sits at 1, and Self-Harm remains at 0. (The highest liked self-harm fic is at 633 likes, and there's a massive drop-off after that to 545, 491, and so on. There aren't even a dozen over 400 likes.)
Sixth? Black tags. And unsurprisingly, Human tops the list again at 66 of 95. (It's statistically significant in the overall, too: 0.93%, which is huge compared to the 0.3% average. They're 22% of all stories but 70% of 1k+ like stories.) Alt-U remains popular as well, with 42 entries. Second Person comes in at 17*, and Anthro is a quiet 3.
Crossover, I'm once more splitting off because there's a lot going on here. There's 10 in total, which is identical to two years ago. It's a wide range, as well: Halo, Fallout (but not Fallout: Equestria, with one exception those top out in the mid-200s at best), He-Man, Pokemon, Team Fortress 2, Minecraft, The Elder Scrolls, Monster Musume, the crazy melting pot that is Sunset's Isekai, and one that isn't clearly marked anywhere but from the comments appears to be Steven King's Dark Tower? Anyway, it's an interesting mix. (There are also three stories - a second Pokemon, Harry Potter, and How To Train Your Dragon - that are crossovers marked with their second series but without the Crossover tag. Shameful.)
So next is seventh and one of the wider ones: Character tags. 57 total characters appear at least once, but there's a couple of trends. First is that the princesses have been dethroned from the top: #1 is now a tie between Original Character and Anon* at 35 stories each. Princess Celestia has a good showing though at 34, with Luna at 29 and Twilight at 28. The general Main 6 tag is at 23. From there it's a drop down to 15 where Other and Chrysalis sit, then Changelings at 10, Cadance at 8, Starlight Glimmer at 6, and then 5 is a shared spot between Sunset Shimmer*, Rainbow Dash, and King Sombra. (Sombra is a notable boost. He only had one appearance in the 1k club last time, and now he's at 5. Dash similarly jumped from 2 to 5.) Summing up the rest with more than a single appearance, you've got 4 (Bat Pony, CMCs, Cozy Glow, Spike, Rarity, Pinkie Pie), 3 (Self-Insert, Tirek), and 2 (Nurse Redheart, Nightmare Moon, Flurry Heart, Lyra, Bon-Bon, Shining Armor, Autumn Blaze, Smolder, Raven Inkwell, Roseluck.) The most notable drop is that Discord's fallen from 4 to a mere 1. Also once more, Fluttershy and Applejack are the least popular of the main crew with just 1 each.
Lastly, let's take a look at the author list and you'll see some pretty significant trends here. There's 72 total authors who hit the mark, with 12 who repeated. Top of the list - likely to absolutely nobody's surprise - is Some Leech with 7. Uh-hmmm comes up next at 5, with Horse Girls Are Watching at 4. Hiver is at 3, and 2 is shared between Rambling Writer, L-N, LSTS Connor, Some Dickhead, nameundetermined, Starscribe, little big pony, and Bobbles. I dove a little deeper and found that interestingly, account age and follow count seem to have almost no influence on if somebody hit the 1k mark or not. 13 of the authors are in the 100 range of follower count (as low as 125 follows - which isn't out of reason for what you'd get for just dropping a highly liked story to begin with.) Account ages are scattered all over, up to and including a 2022. Even the repeat authors aren't influenced by that: three of the multi-story authors have sub-500 follower counts.
So beyond those raw stats, here's some interesting take-aways I spotted:
- Once again, while the Sex tag sells, the Porn tag does not. This was true before and it's even more true now. Some Leech personally makes up 7 of the 11 1k+ like porn stories, and Uh-hmmm takes another 2. The other two are also by repeat authors: Horse Girls Are Watching and little big pony. Despite porn stories making up 17% of all stories in the analyzed time frame, they're basically a dead end for most authors.
- I really need to note that Some Leech throws a wrench in so much of these stats. He's big enough to have a significant impact on the numbers and focused enough to create his own trends within the sample. Just as one data point, he's 7 out of the 8 Fetish-tagged stories. The other repeat authors are much more varied in their output types, but Leech has a very tight lane and that mucks with things.
- Sunset Shimmer is reasonably popular, but Equestria Girls is not. The only EQG tagged story is Sunset's Isekai. All the other Sunset-tagged stories are either Hiver's works where she's a horse, or the one Harry Potter crossover.
- On a similar note, G5 is completely absent. There's one that's getting close at 904 likes, but at its current trends it won't hit 1k for another year.
- Anon is… weird in terms of stats. While a whopping 35 of the stories, the breakdown inside that is really weird. For example, there's 17 Second Person stories, and 16 of them are Anon. 10 out of the 11 Porn stories are Anon. 100% of the Fetish stories, 75% of the Bat Pony stories, and 70% of the M-rated stories are Anon. Anon as a character is strange like that, because there's this kind of line where he's highly popular but it's only in a fairly tight section of stories. Outside those, he's mid-range (for the purposes of his analysis.) (Also all of Some Leech's involve him, which does skew things as I mentioned before.)
- Last time around I cited the presence of the Reverse Gender Roles Equestria (RGRE) stories as having a significant presence: 10 of the 80. They're still around (12 of 95) but it's actually an interesting look at micro-trends. Two years ago, it was a hot subgenre and all over the damn place. Of the 12 that are on this list now? The most recent one is August of 2021, with 9 of the 12 being from 2019. 11 of the 12 are Anon, 8 are Second Person. But more tellingly is that half are incomplete and they make up nearly all of the incompletes that are 2+ years idle. Two years ago this subgenre was all over, and now there's basically only one author (Bobbles) that's actually still updating/writing.
- The reading/voting population has dropped significantly in the last two years. Last time, this looked at a 3 year period and had 80 stories at 1k+ likes. Now that same period would only have 36, which led me to expand the analysis across an extra year. What's left in that 36 is also pretty rough: it's much more concentrated into a few authors and is much more heavily dominated by incomplete works. (Most of those are still actively updating, at least.)
Mmm! Delicious stats!
Now these are stats I can get behind.
This so bears out my rant a few years ago that I seem to write exactly what most people on Fimfiction don’t want.
Have I said before that I love me some stats?
Well, I do. Meanwhile, I'mma just gonna sit over here with only one story having inched past 50 likes…
[I kid, I kid – I have no ambitions of going after anything like this level of traffic. Honestly, if I can get some of my more important planned stories past 100 likes, that'll be enough, honest.]
Not a whole lot to add to your analysis, though id does remind me of something I often forget; a lot of the stories that just surge in traffic are in genres and writing styles I have no interest in (Anon, many of the red tags, HiE, crossovers etc.), once seemingly poised to function as hot clickbait. Must have missed the author Some Leech last time too.
The massive drop-off in recent stories hitting this, both from lower site traffic but also from some of the stores types that sell dropping off, like the Gender Displaced ones, does make me think that when you next do this, you may have to drop the Like threshold below 1,000. Not to 500, necessarily. Maybe to 750? It's a good middle ground, if less eye-catching. Something to consider.
Though, in 2024, the way traffic is trending, we're probably looking at less then 5,000 new stories a year, which a larger chunk of them being M-rated (and mostly smut at that). I won't lie, that's concerning. Though I don't deny a lot of folks get real pleasure from that sort of thing.
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This was something I actually considered, as well as something I was edging towards in that last note. This site isn't the same as it was back in 2014, and expectations can't be the same. I made a similar point regarding follower counts in a different blog post back in mid-2021: the days of dropping a story and getting 200+ follows from that are long gone, and gaining quadruple digits is largely impossible for new authors. It's good to have targets and things to aspire to but they do need to be somewhat realistic to the situation at hand.
Fascinating stuff! Many thanks for collating the data n_n
From memory, wasn't the [Porn] tag introduced considerably more recently than the [Sex] one? I might be wrong (often am!) but if I'm right, that could have a bearing. Mind you, I think [Anon] is a relatively recent addition as well, and you mention that that does well, so what do I know?
I would request Shakespearicles or however that old pervert spells his or her name to be included there.
Just because it is squick clop does not mean the stories are not genuinely good.
What can I say? That thing goes well with kind of comedy that Sockpuppet claims to be "feature box
cheat code".
Also, I know it's weird, but only looking at the stories created and some people be concerned about "more smut" would be misleading, since they are easy to create and not long. lots of authors focus on longer stories nowadays and the amount of word count for non-mature stories might actually have an even larger portion in the future.
and if the goods do not please the crowd and get more likes, it's up to us to share them to the beyond~
And appearing in the Featured box more as well, for readers who only pay attention to that. Something to (loosely) back this up: when I was publishing Hinterlands (17 chapters long, updated weekly), it earned 67 likes over its sixteen-week publishing period. When I was publishing its sequel, Urban Wilds (16 chapters long, updated bi-weekly), Hinterlands earned 67 more likes, even though the publishing period for Urban Wilds was less than eight weeks. The catch is that Hinterlands only started appearing in Featured in the second half of its publication, while Urban Wilds was Featured from day 1. The sequel being featured 16 times led to the same amount of people liking Hinterlands as the original fic being featured 8 times.
...You know, maybe you should've factored sequels into this analysis somehow. (I could hit you up with a Python script.)
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This is correct: the Porn tag didn't get added until 2016. That's actually part of why I drew the line where I did when I wrote the previous blog back in 2019: after that tag was created. In this case, it shouldn't affect the numbers since I cut this blog off at 2019. (You're also right on Anon, but that was at least pre-2017 from a quick bit of research.)
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It isn't a slight on Shakes one bit, but he actually operates a bit below the 1k level these days. He's only had one story break that mark in the last five years (which is included in the round-up for this blog.)
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I actually did look at that, but the sequel status wasn't terribly interesting. Outside of two (Some Leech's porn series of the Student Six and Hiver's continuing Blank Page saga), there were seven sequels. Six of them were sequels to another 1k+ like story (and the remaining one's predecessor only just barely misses with 985) and three of the seven are also stories that appear in this analysis.
What I hadn't looked at and your comment made me think of, was to look at it the other way around. Once more excluding Leech and Hiver, 21 stories in this batch have sequels; 6 are 1k+ likes to follow the original but the rest fall short. Some very short: the three sequels to ruthim345's Minecraft crossover A Crafter's Dream only tally 265 likes between them. Of the 31 sequels, 6 are 1k+ likes; 13 are 500+; and 20 are 250+.
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i try and read your stories even if i skip over most of them because of the clop because they are still good enough to justify it . .
One thing maybe worth noting about Anon that I saw discussed online recently, I think in the Barcast's Discord server: Anon is a specific character, yet a fair number of people who tag him as a character aren't using the actual character. They just interpret it as meaning a generic unnamed character. That doesn't affect your stats, of course: the stories with him tagged did whatever they did, but it may have some bearing on why those perform the way they do, as well as what a reader expects when seeing that tag.